CarbonGuru “launched” on Producthunt today, generating most of the expected range of responses: offers to sell upvotes (going price $1); proposals to trade free votes with other founders on their launches; cold-email promotions for free listings in other product directories; pitches for paid listings in a half-dozen niche launch showcases; follow-up readouts of the add-on spotlight fee schedules for all those ‘free’ directories, etc.
Everything on par for an exercise that was essentially an experiment in lightly automated posting — “Claude, fill in the Producthunt listing form for CarbonGuru…” — and small-scale exploration of how launching works these days. I’ll admit to a hint of curiosity about the contrast with pre-AI-media, maybe on the same order as flipping through a small batch of old vacation postcards on the fridge (or maybe your first few Tik-toks?).
What’s noticeable is how not-great AI and automation ‘shows at the seams’ immediately, even with comparatively simple agents, tasks, and outcomes. It’s visible at the level of individual touch points, and reinforced by the overall customer experiences / flows.
One example: I received three separate emails pitching the same paid listing directory, with very slightly different generated contents, but all in that same noticeably consistent faux-inconsistent punctuation and grammar, delivered with SMSesque casual phrasing.
No doubt all three were triggered, generated by prompts, and then sent one a time, by a loop picking up each of the three category tags I picked from Producthunt’s list.
The delivery spacing – every few hours – shows the heartbeat of the agent process (I assume a tool – maybe home built?). It’s an agent loop working hard to recreate the experience of mis-directed batch-processing output, that adds up to less than the individual pieces.
That’s the second thing that’s noticeable: more is definitely less with these automations, b/c it’s clearly showing seams in several ways at the same time, and on multiple levels. A series of unsolicited emails is vanilla marketing spooge – like a section of repeated ad posters pasted on construction site fencing that fade into the background.
Indifferently executed (effectively an undesigned / uncurated) agent process is an amplifier for the unspoken message that what’s involved – here the new products, the listing directories, the human attention expected and sought on any side, the experience created – is not worth thinking much about in the first place.
That may in fact be true – economics often is what it is, especially for advertising and attention-driven spaces – but then why automate in the first place?